Asimov's Science Fiction (9 page)

"Oh," Jonathan said in that same lazy drawl, "I didn't know that anyone was manufacturing MRI scanners again! Or cancer radiation machines! Why didn't you guys inform me?"

Mrs. Bellingham said sharply, "That's enough, Jonathan."

The doctor turned on Zed, who didn't know why he was the sudden target of anger. "Do you even know what happened fifty-six years ago on June 30th? Jonathan said you'd been raised in some sort of survivalist cult that refuses Synergy."

"I—" A cult? What was that? But then, with sudden dignity, Zed said, "Of course I know what happened on June 30th."

"We must never forget," Mrs. Bellingham said, putting her hands together in the Synergy gesture and bending her head. The hands, Zed noted, were soft and white. On the top of her head, her dark hair fell in short shining folds from a part like a white road to somewhere unimaginable.

"No chance of that with you assholes yammering on and on about it," another voice said, and Zed turned in his chair. A girl stood leaning against the archway to the living room, one hip thrust out insolently, her boots shedding mud on the rug. Mrs. Bellingham's head jerked up and she stood so fast that her chair fell over.

"Isobel! Where have you been for the past two days!"

"Wouldn't you like to know," the girl said.

"Go upstairs right now!"

The girl ignored her. "Who's this?"

"I'm... Zed." He could hardly speak. He hadn't known girls could look like this, not apart from pictures in books or in fantasies when he lay alone in bed. Long shining dark hair, red lips, breasts high and mostly exposed in a tunic that dipped low in front and high in back, glittering with tiny sewn-in bits of mirror or glass or mica.

Isobel drawled, "Hello, Zed."

Dr. Bellingham thundered, "You heard your mother! Get upstairs right now, Isobel, and wait for me!"

She gave a contemptuous little salute and sauntered out. Jonathan rolled his eyes. Mrs. Bellingham's face was so distorted that her prettiness, which Zed had admired until he saw Isobel, was completely gone. Zed felt as if he were drowning in things he did not understand; they filled his lungs and dragged at his feet.

Jonathan said, "Welcome to the family, Zed." And laughed.

On June 30, 2014, the alien ship had gone into orbit around Earth. Every developed nation had known for a week that it was coming, moving in with amazing speed from the direction of the constellation Leo. The ship had answered none of the communications aimed at it in various languages, verbal and mathematical and musical. China had attempted to shoot it down. The nuclear missile had simply vanished. And then, one by one, so had the major cities of Earth. First, greater Bombay and Karachi, vanishing at 2:16 P.M. No explosion, no dust, no blinding light. One moment, reported dazed observers by satellite, the great cities and their vast suburbs had existed and the next they were gone, leaving bare ground that ended in roads sheared off as neatly as if by a very sharp knife, in halves of temples on the shear line, in bisected holy cows. The ground was not even scorched. People standing beyond the vanishing point saw nothing happen.

Fifteen minutes later it was Delhi, Shanghai, and Moscow.

Fifteen minutes after that, Seoul, Sao Paolo, Istanbul, Lima, and Mexico City.

Then Jakarta, New York, Tokyo, Beijing, Cairo, Tehran, and Riyad.

By this time the hysterical media had figured out that cities were vanishing in order of size, and by a progression of prime numbers. At 3:16 P.M. (London, Bogotá, Lagos, Baghdad, Bangkok, Lahore, Dacca, Rio de Janeiro, Bangalore, Wuhan, and Tientsin), the panicked evacuations began. Most people were vaporized (except that no vapor remained) long before they reached the end of the murderous city traffic jams.

Canton, Toronto, Jiddah, Abidjan, Chongqing, Santiago, Calcutta, Singapore, Chennai, St. Petersburg, Shenyang, Los Angeles, Ahmadabad.

Seven nations had fired at the ship, which continued to orbit serenely.

Pusan, Alexandria, Hyderabad, Ankara, Pyongyang, Yokohama, Montreal, Casablanca, Ho Chi Minh City, Berlin, Nanjing, Addis Ababa, Poona, Medellin, Kano.

By midnight, when the ship moved out of orbit, all extended urban areas were gone and with them, 54 percent of the global population. In the United States, it was nearly 80 percent. All of Singapore had vanished, 99 percent of the people of Belgium, 93 percent of Israel, 86 percent of Japan, 80 percent of Canada. In places like Papua New Guinea and Burundi, less than 15 percent of the population vanished, but the government centers had disappeared, as they had everywhere in the world, along with their major medical facilities, research areas, universities, financial and corporate centers, transportation hubs, energy sources, and factories. Houston's oil refineries, Silicon Valley's tech companies, Seattle's Boeing facilities, Harvard and Yale and Stanford and Cal Tech, Wall Street, North Carolina's research triangle, Three Mile Island—all gone. Niagara Falls remained, but the power plant and the tourist city were gone.

People grieved and screamed and panicked and prayed. For a year or so there was some rioting, some senseless destruction, but not as much as people like Zed's parents expected. In the small towns and countryside, with its 20 percent of Americans still alive, there still stood intact the sheriffs' offices, the farms, the cars and wood stoves and doctors' offices, and churches. There were no dead to bury, no rubble to clear away, no enemy to attack. Food was everywhere, too much food, food raised to feed a population that no longer existed. It was summer. No one froze before they could build, with their neighbors' help, a fireplace or wood stove. Some people hoarded, and some barricaded themselves in mountain cabins. But most aided each other with digging wells, canning produce, making trading forays to other towns, butchering cows. There were lots of cows. They taught each other whatever skills they had, and the doctors and engineers and professors and physicists who had survived either took apprentices or passed on what they knew in the small-town colleges that had not been vaporized.

A barter system developed, eventually replaced for local transactions with less cumbersome ones based on scrip. However, much of the mutual help grew from something less self-interested than barter. It was clear to even the most libertarian that if any kind of advanced civilization was going to survive, they needed each other. Synergy was born, first a necessity and then a belief and finally almost a religion. Like all religions, it had followers who ardently believed, followers who half believed, proselytizers and heretics and lip-service "faithful" who laid wreaths every June 30th and carried on with their personal concerns the other 364 days.

In fifty-six years, through cooperation and determination and the occasional but not common local war, the daily living had climbed back to where it had been in approximately 1945, minus any meaningful central government. The new historians, few but devout, predicted that the rate of change was about to accelerate dramatically.

The huge vacant areas where cities stood apparently had not been irradiated; no one developed radiation poisoning. Within a month the enormous bare stretches began to grow grass. Within a year there were bushes, flowers, saplings. The year Zed was born, Boston and New York and Seattle were virgin forests. Chicago was prairie, rich and fertile. New Orleans was a wetlands, thick with plant and animal life. The oceans, no longer over-fished and over-polluted, once again teemed with fish.

When Zed was eleven, the aliens returned.

Mrs. Bellingham, her mouth a thin tight line and her chin wrinkled in fury, led Zed to a small upstairs room with a narrow bed, a chest of drawers, and a rocking chair whose paint was cracked and peeling. A small bathroom lay beyond. She swept out of the room, ignoring his stammered thanks.

Should he go? They didn't want him here. He could survive in the woods, of course—what else had he been doing his whole life? But the Bellinghams were his only gateway out of that life, into... he didn't know what. He couldn't go to college like Jonathan, couldn't become anything important. But Dr. Bellingham had said there were plenty of jobs. Road repair, well digging, wind-turbine tending. And when he could, Zed would build himself a cabin of his own. Did you have to buy the land first? From whom?

He knew nothing, nothing. His parents had let him grow up knowing nothing.

Still, a job and a cabin were a plan, and a reason to stay on at the Bellinghams'. And all those reasons, he knew, were the purest bullshit.

He used the toilet (where did the shit go? The Larches had a privy) and washed himself with rusty water from what must be a seldom-used sink. All the while Zed practically groaned with desire. Images of Isobel filled his mind so completely that it took enormous concentration to pull his belongings from his soiled pillowcase and put them away in the chest, to check his rifle as he had done every night for five years, to lie under the musty quilt, his big body filling the narrow bed and making the old springs groan. Masturbation did not help. Exhausted, he nonetheless could not sleep.

But he must have, because the room was colder and the moon had moved, no longer shedding silver light through the window, when Zed woke to a hand on his shoulder.

His reflexes had been honed by nights in the woods. In a millisecond he was on his feet, rifle in hand, moving to keep the wall at his back. All reflexes failed him the moment he heard Isobel's voice, "Hey, don't shoot, Primitive Boy. That's not the kind of violence I want."

As his eyes adjusted, he made out her outline, and was she... naked? Was that possible?

It was. Zed's erection swelled at the same moment that she moved to press against him and her lips found his. After that, he lost all awareness, or maybe just all later memory of an awareness so heightened that he didn't know where she ended and he started. He came to himself on the bed, Isobel on top of him, her long hair dripping into his mouth, her voice in the darkness both scornful and amused.

"And that's it? What about me?"

He had no idea what she meant.

She chuckled and showed him. He was astonished. He'd never touched a woman's body before, only seen one in pictures, and no pictures in his father's house showed
that.
They went through the entire sequence twice, and then, spent, he lay with her in his arms and thought that if he died at this moment, it would be of sheer happiness. He didn't know that the thought was banal. But when he said it aloud to Isobel, she only chuckled again.

"I love you, Isobel!"

"Whoa, Primitive Boy. We're not there yet."

"But we—"

"Tell me what you know about the aliens."

What? Utterly confused, Zed tried to peer at her face, but she lay with her head against his shoulder and he couldn't see her expression. Her voice had lost its amused chuckle.

"I mean it, Zed. Tell me what you know about the aliens."

It was the first time she'd used his name. He stumbled forward, wanting to please. "Well, they... they came in 2014 and—"

"Not history. What you know about them now."

"They're back, right? They live on the coast, under some sort of energy dome, in what used to be... umm, Providence."

"Boston. That's it? That's all you know?"

His father had ranted against the aliens every night. Mrs. Bellingham had bent her head and said, "We must never forget." What else was there to know? Stupid, stupid—he was so stupid!

He said humbly, "That's all I know."

"You didn't hear that they're taking in some humans to work in the energy dome?" No, he most definitely had not heard that! He started so violently that the springs on the old bed shrilled like trapped rabbits. Zed said, "What do you mean, 'work'? Are they doing experiments on people?" It was one of his father's rants:
Goddamn aliens probably kidnapping human children and torturing them to learn how we're made, all the better to enslave us!

"Experiments? No. Why would they?"

It was a question that had occurred to Zed during his father's rants, but he had never asked it.

Isobel continued, "They can cross interstellar space! They can destroy entire cities! Why would they need to torture us to learn anything, and why would they need humans for slaves?"

There was something wrong with Isobel's argument, but Zed was too sated, and too enthralled, to figure out what. He said humbly, humility so natural to him anyway, "I don't know. Why do you think they're here?"

"They like the place. They're having a vacation. The human workers who have come out from the dome say—"

"Wait! You mean humans can go in and out?"

"That's what I heard. I mean, not every day, they live there, but I heard about one girl who decided to quit her job and they just opened a gate in the energy dome and out she went. Didn't you hear that?"

Zed never heard anything, but he'd had time to find the flaw in her argument. "If they have so much technology that they don't need slaves, then why do they need human workers?"

"Ah, that's the big question. One of them, anyway. The other is what happened to the girl who came out of the dome. She disappeared."

"The aliens killed her?"

"No. God, you really are an innocent, aren't you? She lived in one of the towns closest to the dome, and when she went home, the Earthers killed her. For fraternizing."

Zed did know about the Earthers. They were the underground resistance movement, dedicated to revenging the cities and driving the aliens from Earth. So far, they had accomplished zero toward either goal.

Isobel said, "Wouldn't you think that almost sixty years would be enough to get over June 30th? Sixty years after World War II we were allies with Japan even though we dropped atom bombs on them. Hell, thirty years later we were allies! Plus with Germany, and all that."

Zed had barely heard of World War II—was that back when those "Romans" built a great city? He didn't know what to say, so he said nothing. Isobel detached herself from his arms and rose up on one elbow. Again the bed groaned. "Zed, do you hate the aliens?"

Did he? Until this bewildering evening, he assumed that he had. But what Isobel said had made sense. His grandfather, Zed knew, had once fought in a place called Iraq, someplace across the ocean, and been killed there. His mother had said so, mourning that long ago in her soft, tired voice. Yet his mother hadn't mentioned hating any Iraq people. Well, she never mentioned them at all except for that once, but didn't that mean that she didn't hate them? His father mentioned things he hated all the time: the aliens, the "illegitimate government" that made Zed attend school, the storekeeper in Carlsville who charged ten scrip for a bag of sugar, the aliens, raccoons that ate the fruit crop, the aliens...